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The DataCAD Developer Network (DDN) is an online resource for information and support for DCAL® (DataCAD Applications Language) developers as well as anyone interested in creating fonts, toolbars, hatch patterns, or linetypes for use in DataCAD.

Hi,I think that drawing files from DCAD 19 are compatible back to DataCAD 15, but can anybody confirm if the same is true for layer (.dlf) file ? Specifically, Could a layer file created in v19 be imported into a drawing using v15 without any issues ?Thanks,David H.

I tried installing DataCAD 15 to answer this myself, but was unable to (downloaded from https://www.datacad.com/download/datacad/DataCAD_15.html and installed .. I hoped it would give me a trial period as I had never previously had v15 installed, but it immediately said that my trial had expired .... ??).

The reason I am asking this question is that I have developed a way to add entities with features not supported by DCAL by creating a layer file that contains an entity with the desired feature and, and then reading the layer file in my macro and copying and updating the entity with other desired properties that are supported by DCAL. As I am creating my layer file using DataCAD 19, I want to be able to accurately tell potential users the compatibility with previous versions of DataCAD.

If anybody is interested, an example of the logic I am using is below. This example creates a text entity with Knockout (which is not supported by DCAL, although once a text entity with knockout is added the macro can update the Knockout_ENL attribute that specifies the size of the knockout), but I can think of several other cases where similar logic could be used to add things that are not supported by DCAL.

BEGIN doKnockOut := GetSvdBln ('dhBlockerKO', false); if doKnockOut then ! DCAL does not support knockout, so we need to effectively copy an entity that already has knockout, so we ! read a layer file into a temp layer, then copy a text entity with knockout from that layer, and then update ! that entity to have the attributes of the entity being added.